Via costar.com
The AI lab that signed nearly 1 million square feet of San Francisco office space is now telling employees to stay home
Anthropic, one of the most heavily funded AI companies in the world, has instructed its San Francisco-based employees to work from home. For a company that spent the last few years quietly becoming one of the city’s largest commercial tenants, that’s a notable pivot.
The directive applies to staff based in San Francisco, where Anthropic has built an enormous physical footprint centered in the SoMa district, a neighborhood that has effectively become the gravitational center of the US AI industry.
From mega-leases to work-from-home #
By mid-2026, the company’s office footprint in the city reached nearly 1 million square feet.
Anthropic was founded in January 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with a group of researchers who had previously worked at OpenAI.
One of the most significant pieces of that real estate puzzle came in 2023, when Anthropic signed a lease for an entire building at 500 Howard Street, taking over space previously held by Slack. Additional leases in the surrounding SoMa area followed, building out a campus-style presence in a neighborhood where AI companies now cluster.
The hybrid tension that never really went away #
Most Bay Area-based employees were expected to attend the office regularly, while certain remote roles carried expectations of roughly 25% in-office time or periodic clustered onsite weeks.
The company also offered home office stipends and relocation support.
What has changed is the direction of the directive. Rather than a standing expectation of regular office attendance with exceptions carved out for remote workers, the current instruction runs the other way: San Francisco staff are being told to work from home.
What this means for Anthropic and the broader AI sector #
Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, a corporate structure that imposes obligations beyond pure profit maximization.
Google, Meta, and Amazon have all leaned into harder in-office mandates over the past two years, in some cases tying badge-swipe data to performance reviews.
San Francisco’s office market has been under sustained pressure since 2020, with vacancy rates in some districts reaching historic highs. Anthropic’s aggressive leasing was one of the more bullish signals in the city’s commercial property market.
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